Blanche: The devotee who made the call referred to them by
their diseased body parts.

Louis: See what you can do to resolve the perceiver into
that which was perceived. Get him something decent, pure in
eye.

Blanche: Some ecstatic children were rolling it down the
hall when the fictive mother made those marks herself. A
man grown suddenly old may be a physiognomist or picture-
explainer.

Louis: Many married women will always be in your footsteps.

Blanche: He had his history there, too, walking on tiptoes.

Louis: Her arms shot out numb and rigid.

Blanche: The more I work on these plants the more the
fascination of them grows upon me.

///////////////////////////////////////

ACT I, SCENE II

(Third character enters: Gabrielle Russier--30 yr old french
schoolteacher who had an affair with 16 yr old male student
of hers. Police, govt., family drove her to imprisonment,
madness, suicide.)

Set: (loose stones lying on the ground are generally white
but otherwise dark)

Blanche: collecting seaweed during a seaside holiday relaxes
in the long run.

Louis: those long lines of gentle puppets. Continued her
plant experiments. Lombroso's skull collection.

Blanche: In whose shadow such alternative relationships had
always been conducted.

Louis: Knows how to deserve her--flash, flit, shine, look
like, adorn who amuse others by uttering the same thing in
two or three.

Blanche: Not after she told those two dreams but later.
Like those who depict infernoes. Might have simply fallen
back.

Louis: Very different arms receive him.

Blanche: That's why he associates with us, using a picture
of a skeleton.

Louis: To bring the machine into perfect timing.

Blanche: We want him alive and we want him agile. Balancing
on her heels and head like an acrobat.

Julian: (the runaway should suddenly decide to
talk)

Gabrielle: I wasn't there.

Blanche: Fathers who encouraged daughters, every kind of
caution. Try to have more presence of mind.

Gabrielle: I thought it would be safe to see you again.

Blanche: Could not drive in poor light.

Gabrielle: The charges against me may be reduced.

Louis: The opportunity to study birds. I really must settle
down to drawing horses.

Julian: (his angels haul him off to the stall)

Blanche: Who make drawings on paper of such things as men,
birds, beasts, eagles, or insects. The erection of a palace
set with jewels. Objects or images by which you may earn a
living. really meant tottering.

Gabrielle: I didn't waste too much time.

Julian: (she hands her a sheet of paper typed on
both sides)

Blanche: We whisper, we go over the same ground again,
again. Texts confiscated and destroyed.

Gabrielle: Look for chinks.

///////////////////////////////////////

ACT I, SCENE III

In a circular chamber, quite dark

Blanche: Her grief spreads throughout her body: hybridism,
artificial breeding, rudimentary organs. She looked for a
victim, anyone who had dissected the hand, the viscera, or
even a feather.

Louis: Who dare say whether it is or it isn't more beautiful
than nature?

One or two small shrouded lamps placed on the floor serve
dimly to light the way to a few descending steps. He, who
is beginning to suffer under her domination, becomes
conscious that the scene before him is slowly moving away.
This room in reddish-blue, ruined windows, half choked with
ivy.

Gabrielle: Here is clearly seen what's left of me from
before: bits of stone that happen to look like organic
forms.

Blanche: Have you really experienced all that? The wish to
capture evanescent reflections?

Gabrielle: Instead of staring at an ancient photograph, he
resorted to a peculiar technique.

Blanche: If you want to study seriously, right after the
first woman you mention in your book, go out into the open
air.

Gabrielle: The whole night with her, threatened by a
revolver, kept alive by rumors...

Blanche: Systematically to construct the head, the sensitive
condition of the eye, I mean, your head, which unites the
shape of the landscape as we know it with this apparent
mirage.

Louis: Concept and execution reveal a touching effort,
occasionally obscured. His striving for extreme naturalism
also holds good for hues and broken colors.

Blanche: The eye soon became sufficiently accumstomed to the
priviledged case of a parallel projection, the various
ways it can be disturbed or made to look strange as a
process of degeneration.

Gabrielle: When speaking parts are forbidden, the ear has no
direction.

Louis: The same sentence has three meanings: they were
consumed with curiosity as to how it was done. And now
something strange happened to our Charlotte: the desire for
newsreels and travel films.

///////////////////////////////////////

ACT II SCENE I

A long, very brightly lit room, where there are several long
tables on which you can see, standing side by side in wooden
supports, test tubes containing powders of the same dazzling
colour as the streams in the courtyard . . . liquids of the
same colour are being heated in retorts suspended above
little flames.

Blanche: What is he talking to you about?

Louis: The son of an itinerant miniature painter found it
fun to make his entry upside down. Lost all judgment of
time and place. Joined believers. Finally found the
marginal. In exploration lies disillusionment.

Blanche: Has she forgotten you for casting colored shadows
on the floor?

Louis: Effects that had to be achieved with oil lamps. Each
time she took a photograph, they insisted these gaps serve
to remind us--images are hardier. My brain burns under a
kind of writing table.

Blanche: Where did you steal it?

Louis: I can't understand why you scientific people
feverishly examine his clothes. Rarity and distance permit
oddly beautiful disregard. Better to shun science
altogether. All we need for process to appear as plot--
shoot a sudden . . .

Blanche: Why are we doing this?

Louis: To perform extraordinary feats of endurance,
haphazard visions dumped allowing anyone wild locusts and
miraculous relics. The discovery that an actual
thunderstorm was going on at the same time spread like
wildfire all over Europe . . .

Blanche: Up to his neck in water, a seam opened and he
followed her foolishly up. As are as we are sane, lumpen,
stranded, witness of the invisible world, placed in sudden
darkness, barely trace her scowl.

///////////////////////////////////////

ACT II, SCENE II

Louis: Past a certain degree, the old show business premise
persisted.

(The grotesque object, witnessed at all times, in squalid,
cramped quarters)

Gabrielle: Mediums can be physical: in a kind of silent
transparency.

Julian: Deprived of memory and understanding, balance helps
to orient us in mental space.

(The only space we experience assumes the terrible
appearance of a desert.)

Gabrielle: A skateboard-sized device reveals this secret
like a rebus. One person and not another entered his memory
as a disconnected sequence of optical displays.

Louis: You must stop moving away from us, threatening to
shake the whole building down.

Blanche: All the drifters on earth provide cases and covers
for their possessions.

Louis: Such feelings were exaggerated for the mere
gratification of gazers.

Blanche: The end of any alliance with them: the random
gestures and words.

Julian: Lavish all these considerations on a broken brain?

Gabrielle: Continue the journey, proud, vindictive; slip
into this excess.

Blanche: Monstrous and alive, quite close, the face is
removed like a mask.

Gabrielle: You thought you held someone, the apparent
dryness and coolness of the skin.

(His memory is suddenly flooded with her shoes, in the final
flash)

Louis: Words were threadbare; the tin cascade was done away
with.

Gabrielle: Why do you try so desperately to explain
everything in abnormally cautious language?

Blanche: Swimming back and forth across the river without
stopping in the serene world.

///////////////////////////////////////

ACT II, SCENE III

Set: ottomans and sofas are dispersed around awkwardly
shaped rooms and niches. magnifying glasses mounted around
the platform to provide maximum display.

Gabrielle: I lay on the backseat.

Julian: The scene of secret and hidden experiments. Stricken
on the road, both repulsed and grateful.

Julian: The many shapes of the agony of imprisonment
decompose into images . . .

Gabrielle: Not into narrations, all those stammered,
imperfect words. Julian, there were people who couldn't
move. There I was, kindling their spirits.

Julian: Whoever looks on this from outside, some
culpability, even complicity.

Gabrielle: With the addition of Julian and his monstrous
music inserted mysteriously into the background, as he lies
embedded in the 19th century, with chains still on his feet.
Julian, the mind is luminous. From the running, I like to
brag.

Julian: No denial however vehement, with her mechanical
smile, fugitive and waning. Expresses on the ground, rotten
field, ideas only rendered partially visible by plays on the
surface of things. Does not remain loyal to the spectacle of
the skeleton.

Gabrielle: But when I kneel, certainty vanishes.

Julian: The wish to be twisted.

Gabrielle: These are no angels. An implicit conspiracy or
something when they give me money. It is very important that
you pay for what you brought.

///////////////////////////////////////

ACT II, SCENE IV

Louis: Did you sleep with everyday objects and profane
texts?

Blanche: The brain can see desire drawing a curtain. Eau de
nile, the name of a color, an unbounded fragment of a world
open to everything that lives, but not admonitions.

Gabrielle: Take white pillowcases to the ocean to scatter
the guts out on the ground. Different surfaces on panels, colored or not, a woman reading a letter.

Blanche: Didn't you feel it didn't you hear it, a piece of
white satin?

Gabrielle: Why have you come back to their monotonous
nights?

Blanche: The skies are scanned with pity from close up a
decline, a breath to the pride, a trust to devices, thing
devoid of hope which opened intimate links to the world of
shadows, phantom content unfolding, like that of the eye
itself.

Gabrielle: You cannot tell what is causing unfolding
shadows.

Blanche: Something is happening that is going to happen in
caves or in rooms without windows.

Gabrielle: Only oblivion can suppress unceasing interplay of
sound and sense.

Blanche: An arm dangling in the bus aisle, the world
staining the surface as if it were an outside force, a
certain disposition of the heart.

Louis: They become them without my permission, monsters -
that is, etymologically, beings or things to be shown.

Gabrielle: The task of healing these broken vessels projects
itself out of me.

///////////////////////////////////////

ACT III, SCENE I

Blanche: You can't just walk in here you know, with the same
gestures to set them apart.

Gabrielle: In the geography of haunted places she would walk
him to the water.

Louis: Prudence, about to put his foot in a puddle, blasts
apart.

Gabrielle: He seldom omitted to introduce Mem, a woman, a
being in unlimited space.

Louis: The phenomena, curiosities, and philosophy of the
sense of sight, they warned me not to get inflated ideas

Gabrielle: He's getting weaker every day.

Blanche: Has actually married his gallery of statues.
Shadows from the stag antlers on the wall. To think such
nights will never return.

Louis: We live in the picture, we were all great pretenders.

Gabrielle: To conceal and reveal, that's not a lot, is it?

Blanche: Do not speak in a human voice. Speak as if they
were true.

Gabrielle: Everyone knew I was writing something about that
night--faces torn by bites. But an animal with strange
mechanisms. Doing the work of a machine.

Louis: Every second was the narrow portal become special and
set apart. The bleak world of beasts and things, of my
magical prowess.

Gabrielle: So perfectly solid. Leaves little space for
aberration.

Louis: An arguable relationship to the knowledge of
cadavers. Time itself moves slowly, if at all.

Gabrielle: He has color, he is calm, he speaks of the prior
world. This wedge of light, would you wander around in it?

///////////////////////////////////////

ACT III, SCENE II

(Lit by two sad white neon shells of sea-green light.)

Blanche: I did not know in what vague manner I would see
myself on some pages, what counts as evidence: strange,
forgotten, lovely things.

Gabrielle: The ramparts of his solitude deep in our genes
feel safe now with me, locked within the theater of his
body. There were these candles and he was moaning through
intricate, recurrent sequences.

Louis: To be able to see clearly distant things inside the
usual Parisian thunderstorms, select four sentences which
you think are keys; scribble, breathing hard. If you don't
like the words or gestures, revisualize the opulent flesh
which once covered these bones, amoeba-like fissioning
wherein the word exudes an erotic aura.

Julian: What really matters is that she was a foreigner
without ever being at a loss for words, a condition acquired
in a green chair in the park in the afternoon.

(Scattering various sheets of paper and maps over the
reeking carnage of the furniture with their legs, the angels
straddle corridors of quaint and amusing things.)

Blanche: Revelations are unclear: I pacify the bloody-
minded.

(Huge thorns or soldiers in uniform quiver, extend, grow
small)

Gabrielle: All these pretended peddlers of the future are
susceptible to the ceremony of her hands.